Rockville Centre native Doris Kearns Goodwin to be recognized by the Academy of Arts and Letters

Rockville Centre native Doris Kearns Goodwin will be honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters this year. She was selected by the academy last week as the recipient of the prestigious Gold Medal for literature.

Goodwin, who has been dubbed “America’s Historian-in-Chief,” is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist and commentator who is renowned for her biographical works on former Presidents of the United States.

“There is something magical about this thing called history,” Goodwin told the Herald in a 2018 interview, discussing her formative years in Rockville Centre. In her 1997 memoir, “Wait Till Next Year,” she details her Irish-Catholic upbringing and her time at South Side High School. “Don’t take Rockville Centre for granted,” she said. “Looking back on it now, I realize how lucky I was.”

After high school, she went on to attend Colby College in Maine and later received a doctorate in government from Harvard University in 1968.

Goodwin was accepted into a White House Fellowship program in 1967, during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. She was brought in as a member of his staff, after Johnson decided not to run for reelection, during which time she worked on domestic anti-poverty efforts.

She later went on to teach a course on the American precedence at Harvard, while at the same time working with Johnson on drafting his memoirs. Based on her own experiences at the White House, she went on to pen her own biography about the Johnson administration, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” which was a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 1977.

But it was the success of her third biography, “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II,” that won her the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995.

She was also honored with the Lincoln Prize a decade later for her book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” about the 16th president’s cabinet. It also won the American History Book Prize from the New-York Historical Society. Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 film, “Lincoln,” which received 12 Academy Award nominations, was based in part on her book as well.

She will be presented with the Gold Medal in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her latest work, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” The book—part memoir, part biography—follows her late husband, Richard “Dick” Goodwin, during the tenuous political climate in the 1960s. Dick was an influential advisor for President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Senator Eugene McCarthy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Together they reflect on the times, combing through a series of keepsakes including letters, photos, diaries, and drafts of speeches including JFK’s inaugural address and Johnson’s “Great Society” and “We Shall Overcome” speeches. It is also a deeply personal reflection on her final moments with her late husband before his death in 2018.

“It means more to me than anything I’ve ever written,” she told the Briscoe Center for American History in Texas. The Center, one of the country’s leading research centers for historical study, will feature an exhibition “History and Fate: The Goodwins and the 1960s,” in October that will explore key moments that defined the times from presidential campaigns, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

Doris Kearns Goodwin will be presented with the award in May when the academy will induct its new members. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has presented the Gold Medal, its highest honor, since 1909. They are presented in recognition of the recipients' entire works. To learn more about this year’s award recipients visit ArtsandLetters.org.